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From the archives

Positively Shady

The glamorous activism of M.A.C Cosmetics

Muslim Pride

A timely LGBTQ memoir

Minor Hockey as Big Business

The disturbing shift from kids’ game to pricey investment

Mel Cappe

Mel Cappe is professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto and was the 18th clerk of the Privy Council, secretary to cabinet and head of the Public Service of Canada.

Articles by
Mel Cappe

Primus extra pares

The evolution of the job of PM November 2017
When Governing from the Centre by Donald Savoie was published in 1999, positing that power had begun consolidating in the Prime Minister’s Office in the mid 1990s, I argued with Savoie that the evolution of this phenomenon was important, but it was not new. Rather, I noted, it could be traced back to Trudeau père and the advent of a centralizing PMO that had the likes of Marc…

The Idea Juggler

New thoughts, new approaches, new words to tackle old problems June 2007
I am on a train between Montreal and Ottawa reading Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and thinking about how to characterize Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Is it a thoughtful, intellectual and well-researched treatise or is it a well-meaning, rhetorical…